Recently, we have been installing Windows Server Essentials R2 on most of the new servers we install. I feel like it is a great operating system, but I kept running into issues when I was going through the setup of the server. Here is a brief rundown of the issue and the resolution we came up with.

Problem: I would install Windows Server Essentials R2 and create the default administrator account. Once I logged into the default administrator account the “Configure Windows Server Essentials” dialog would come up. I entered the information and then clicked, “Configure”. However, every time the setup wizard would get to one or two percent and it would give the following error message: “An error occurred while configuring Windows Server Essentials. Please try again. “  I would hit the “Retry” button but it would still fail. I then rebooted the server but when I logged into the administrator account, the setup wizard wouldn’t let me change the information I entered. I then had to reboot the server and reinstall the operating system. As you can see it was quite frustrating reinstalling the operating system again and again. 

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